Larry Polansky OBITUARY

Larry Polansky OBITUARY

Santa Cruz resident Larry Polansky died in Aptos, California, on 9 May 2024, at the age of 69. A brilliant, generous, and creative man whose interests acknowledged few disciplinary boundaries, Larry was a music composer, guitarist and professional performer of plucked strings, 38-year-long college-level educator, computer music programmer, writer, scholar, editor, publisher, and theorist, as well as an avid student of Shaker music, Indonesian gamelan, Judaism, experimental tuning theory, American Sign Language poetry, and much more. Born in New York City to first-generation Jewish Americans, Larry grew up in Valley Stream (Nassau County) on Long Island. At an early age he became fascinated with the guitar, an instrument that remained central to his creative work for the rest of his life. He went on to study with Chuck Wayne, George Barnes, and Lee Konitz, and once found himself playing a spontaneous gig with Lennie Tristano. Early on he focused on jazz guitar, but his musical interests and influences went on to range from bluegrass to the J.S. Bach Cello Suites, from the Carter Family to May Aufderheide, from Lou Harrison to Mississippi fiddle tunes, from Muddy Waters to Malvina Reynolds. He composed hundreds of complex and unique piecessome seemingly impossibleand hundreds of situational rounds, which highlighted his humor, musical ingenuity, and appreciation of the quotidian. Upon his high school graduation in 1972–he reported failing senior English but allegedly had such high SAT scores he was allowed to graduate anyway–he traveled alone in Latin America for almost a year, becoming fluent in Spanish along the way; later he lived in Indonesia and Australia. Though Larry frequently claimed to have had no formal music education, his college years took him to New College (Sarasota, FL), UC Santa Cruz, York University (Toronto), and the University of Illinois (Champaign-Urbana). He lived briefly in Moscow, Idaho, where he had a job sweeping volcanic ash off the roof of a shopping mall when Mt. St. Helens erupted in May of 1980. Following the completion of his MA at the University of Illinois, he worked as a gigging guitarist and arranger in New York City for approximately one year, struggling to make ends meet. Larry’s employment history took him from Mills College in Oakland, CA (1981-1990), to Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire (1990-2013), to UC Santa Cruz (2013-2019). He liked to joke that he had the privilege of retiring twice, and he was proud to hold the title of Professor Emeritus at both Dartmouth and UCSC. His teaching influenced several generations of composers, scholars, writers, and musicians, and he collaborated with dancers, filmmakers, animators, and poets. He was the recipient of Fulbright, Guggenheim, and Mellon New Directions fellowships for his creative research. As a young student in the mid-1970s, Larry became involved in early computer music research, participating in pioneering computer development programs at Stanford University and the University of Illinois. Arriving at UCSC in 1975, he met composer James Tenney, who became one of Larry’s most important mentors and scholarly collaborators. While at Mills College during the 1980s, he co-invented a music programming language called Hierarchical Music Specification Language (HMSL) with colleagues Phil Burk and David Rosenboom, and co-founded Frog Peak Music (a composers’ collective) with Jody Diamond, which has housed and distributed independent experimental music for over forty years. Larry’s many musical experiences included playing acoustic and electric guitar, mandolin, mandola, and mandocello, psaltery, mountain dulcimer, transfer harp, banjo, ukulele, and others. His compositions have been recorded internationally, and he can be heard playing on recordings for close friends and collaborators including Christian Wolff, Lois V Vierk, David Mahler, Daniel Goode, Barbara Monk Feldman, and many others. Larry’s compositions (to name just a few) included: Psaltery, a tape piece consisting of over 100 tracks of a specially tuned Appalachian hand-held bowed psaltery with minor electronic modification (1979); B’rey’sheet (In the Beginning; Cantillation Study #1) for voice and voice-controlled live computer (1986); the rock-inspired 51 Melodies (1991) for two electric guitars, bass, and drums; the epic Lonesome Road (The Crawford Variations), 51 variations on an arrangement by Ruth Crawford for solo piano (1989); freeHorn, an ensemble piece with real-time computer interaction (2004); and Songs and Toods, five pieces for solo guitar or the Lou Harrison Just Intonation National Steel Guitar (2005). One of his final pieces, Five Songs for Kate and Vanessa, for violin and cello, was written for Bay Area musicians Kate Stenberg and Vanessa Ruotolo (2019), and premiered and recorded in the days before the Covid pandemic. His unique compositional style pushed the boundaries of what was normally expected of instrumentalists, as he frequently required them to sing, communicate in ASL, retune on the spot, or perform other unusual activities while playing their instruments. His many recordings appear on labels New World Records, Cold Blue, Artifact, and others. Larry’s scholarly output included theoretical articles like “The Structure of Morphological Space” (2019); “OWT: A Real-Time Optimal Tuning Application” (2008); “Hierarchical Temporal Gestalt Perception in Music” (1980); and many more. His musicological pursuits included the first documentation and cataloging of the forgotten works of composer Johanna Magdalena Beyer (“Total Eclipse: The Music of Johanna Magdalena Beyer,” 1996). In 2001, he completed a book-length edition of Ruth Crawford Seeger’s The Music of American Folk Song, a monograph left uncompleted at the time of her death in 1951; in 2015 he completed a (co)-edition of From Scratch: Collected Theoretical Essays of James Tenney. This list barely scratches the surface of his formidable lifetime of research, writing, and editing. Larry’s final five years following retirement from UCSC were filled with daily tai chi classes at The Tannery and Ocean View Park, competitive Saturday mornings at Soquel High with the Santa Cruz Tennis Club, constant music making at home, enjoyment of his cats and neighbors, and many scenic bike rides to West Cliff Drive and Wilder Ranch. Larry is survived by his partner (and UCSC Music Department Chair) Amy C. Beal, his daughter Anna Diamond Polansky-Hicks and granddaughter Maya Ann (Lebanon, NH), his ex-wife Jody Diamond (Red Hook, NY), his brother and author Steven Polansky and sister-in-law Julie Filapek (Appleton, WI), his nephews Benjamin Polansky and Michael Polansky, and his niece Sylvia Polansky. Plans for a memorial service have not been finalized at this time.